Letter to Catholic
Women

by John N.Collins

from Letters to Deacons, 1999.

August 13. Commemoration of
Radegund Queen and Deacon, 587 CE

Clotaire I fell upon
Hermenfred, vanquished him, and carried home a great booty. Among the
prisoners, Radegundes, then about twelve years old, fell to the lot of King
Clotaire, who gave her an education suitable to her birth, and caused her to be
instructed in the Christian religion, and baptized. Clotaire at length caused
her brother to be treacherously assassinated, that he might seize on his
dominions in Thuringia. Radegundes, shocked at this base act of inhumanity,
asked his leave to retire from court, which she easily obtained. Clotaire
himself sent her to Noyon, that she might receive the religious veil from the
hands of St Medard. The holy prelate scrupled to do it for some time, because
she was a married woman; but was at length prevailed upon to consecrate her a
deaconess. She employed almost her whole revenue in alms, and served the poor
with her own hands. St Radegundes went some time after to Poitiers, and there
built a great monastery of nuns, in which she procured a holy virgin, named
Agnes, to be made the first abbess, and paid to her an implicit obedience in
all things. Being desirous to perpetuate the work of God, she wrote to a
council of bishops that was assembled at Tours in 566, entreating them to
confirm the foundation of her monastery, which they did under the most severe
censures. The emperor sent her a piece of that sacred wood of the true cross of
our Redeemer, also a book of the four gospels beautified with gold and precious
stones, and the relics of several saints. They were carried into Poitiers, and
deposited in the church of the monastery by the Archbishop of Tours. It was on
this occasion that Venantius Fortunatus composed the hymn, Vexilla regius
prodeunt. St Radegundes had invited him and several other holy and learned men
to Poitiers; was herself a scholar, and read both the Latin and Greek
fathers.

Dear Catholic Women

Should Roman Catholic women seek to be ordained deacons? From various
quarters - sometimes from the same quarter - one gets both a yes and a no
answer to this question. I suspect, however, that one would need a certain
panache to carry a yes vote among most women who follow a feminist line in
theology.

In discussing the question with Roman Catholic women then, I am going to
pick my way carefully before declaring a position. Indeed quite a deal of what
follows is going to be about the need to clarify the question before pressing
for an answer.

The first factor affecting the question is the climate in the church at
present. While, as we shall note, the question of diaconal ordination for women
has been raised here and there for over forty years, and indeed over the last
decade has been favoured at increasingly influential levels, questions about
ordaining women to anything have taken on a new dimension since Pope John Paul
II declared on Pentecost Sunday 1994 that "the Church has no authority
whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women".

One reaction to this on the part of some women has been to seek
ordination to the diaconate, "a lower level of the hierarchy", in the words of
the Second Vatican Councils Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, but
nonetheless "a proper and permanent rank of the hierarchy". In the words of the
Catechism of the Catholic Church, the diaconate is "conferred by a
sacramental act called ordination, that is, by the sacrament of
Holy Orders". The catechism makes clear in the same teaching, however, that the
diaconate is a third "degree" of hierarchy and lies outside "the two degrees of
ministerial participation in the priesthood of Christ: the episcopacy and the
presbyterate."

The question of women deacons has drawn further interest as a
consequence of the pronouncement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith on October 28, 1995, that in the Apostolic Letter the pope "has handed
on" teaching which "has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal
magisterium".

Those women who are attracted to the diaconate in the light of these
doctrinal developments are variously motivated. For some who continue to commit
themselves to seeking priestly ordination for women, the precedent set by
Anglican women has become a model for action. Just as many of them succeeded
first in being ordained deacons - and with what commitment we see from the
profoundly moving statement in November 1992 of June Osborne to the General
Synod of the Church of England - and then advanced quickly in some countries to
attaining the right to priesthood (1987 to 1992 in the case of England) some
Roman Catholic women have set themselves a similar agenda.

By contrast, other women have sensed the hopelessness of pursuing
priestly ordination in their own lifetimes and have committed themselves
instead to assuaging their loss by taking up the struggle to attain "the lower
level". In tandem with these are others who have less trouble accepting the
restrictions on women in this matter and turn with a warm commitment to seeking
ordination as deacons, which they have come to see as a real possibility in the
Roman Catholic Church of our times.

Some of the latter are indeed women who in any circumstances would seek
nothing more than to be deacons in the fashion of women in an earlier age of
the church who bore that name. But of course in such an erudite corner of
church history we encounter debate here among experts. If we accept the
arguments of Aimé Martimort we have little to encourage us to build a
modern diaconal role for women on past practice. Against his own evidence,
however, and strongly controverting opinions of an equally eminent scholar,
Cipriano Vagaggini, as well as of the historian Roger Gryson, Martimort
concludes that the ancient deaconess was not even ordained. In this he declines
to acknowledge that for well known sociological reasons the women were
ordained to a more restricted form of diaconate than men. Their
diaconal role was minor, women deacons being deemed in places more appropriate
ministers than the male deacons in respect of women who were sick or who were
being baptised.

Close to such women who want ordination to diaconate for its own sake
there are yet others who are already professionally engaged in pastoral work
and would cherish the opportunity to have their undertakings blessed and
commissioned in the church by ordination as deacons. The same could be said for
many women voluntarily engaged in similar works. It is important to note that
precisely such pastoral involvement was adduced as sufficient reason to offer
diaconal ordination to men in the Second Vatican Councils Decree on the
Churchs Missionary Activity, Ad gentes (no. 16).

In all of these situations the allure of ordination does not necessarily
lie in the promise of spiritual benefit from the reception of the so-called
permanent character conferred through the sacrament, although the Catechism
of the Catholic Church makes much of this aspect of its theology of orders.
In fact at this point the English translation is most unfortunate (no. 1570):
"The sacrament of Holy Orders marks them [deacons] with an imprint
("character") which cannot be removed and which configures them to Christ, who
made himself the deacon or servant of all." To apply the technical
ecclesiastical term "deacon" to Jesus of the gospels in this way is to prejudge
the case; the Greek term should be left translated here as simply
"servant".

That piece of Vatican parti pris aside, we are all probably aware that
some women see that the distinct advantage of permission for women to be
ordained deacons would be the new canonical status accruing to them as a result
of ordination. They would now belong to the clergy, and this is an advancement
at once ecclesial and social which would, they hope, enhance their bureaucratic
efficiency within official circles, facilitate their progress through the halls
of power, and open eventually to an equal access for women to governance in the
church.

As already suggested, among women pursuing such equality are likely to
be very few of the increasing number who band together to fashion a new
spirituality not dependent on a sacrament reserved to men or who pool their
political skills for the purpose of achieving greater effectiveness in the
male-led institution independently of male-led concessions to them.

In women circles of this kind one senses a vibrant intolerance of the
whole question of who gets ordained and why. As is well known, the experience
of living under an exclusively male order in the church has provided more than
enough ground for many women to walk away from the institutional church. For
many again, however, the experience has stirred new energies, and their
rejection of hierarchical systems is not necessarily a denial of the value of
pastoral leadership within the church. What gives rise to the intolerance is
the perception that both the theology of the sacrament of order and the closely
associated suprastructures of canon law are so deeply imbued with androcentric
character as to make it virtually impossible for these women to fashion a
usable image of pastoral leadership within the church they have inherited. None
of them has aspirations to be a recycled cleric. Were that to provide the
paradigm, the last state of the church, in their view, would be worse than the
first.

Hence the earlier hesitations about rushing into answers for the
question at hand. One does not necessarily know the audience one is addressing,
and a satisfactory response to one part of the audience may merely provide
problems for another. The ambiguities and conflicts which women have had to
confront on these issues can be sampled in the collection of experiences
brought together by Virginia Ratigan and Arlene Swidler in A New
Phoebe.

It is truly interesting  astounding, in the view of Margret Morche
in her history of the origins of the modern diaconate  that the question
of womens right to ordination into diaconate was raised at one of the
very first exploratory conferences on the diaconate at the Royaumont abbey near
Paris in March 1959, just two months after John XXXIII had announced the
calling of the Second Vatican Council. Other initiatives prior to the council
have been noted by Friederike Kukula, and the long, persistent endeavours since
the council have been detailed by Ilse Schüllner in A New
Phoebe and, in a thorough academic survey, in a long appendix to
Diakonat, the volume of papers edited by Peter Hünermann and others
for the conference on womens right to ordination as deacons which took
place in Stuttgart in April 1997.

This conference, conducted on strictly academic lines even to the extent
of having arguments presented against womens right to ordination, put a
resolution to German bishops that they request an indult from Rome recognising
bishops right to ordain women deacons in their dioceses. Of course this
conference brought together women who were seeking such an outcome, so that in
fact its firm resolution does little to resolve ambiguities for those women who
reject the concept or continue to have reservations on one ground or
another.

In the contemporary context, the climate of discussion can easily be
inhibited and is sometimes embittered by the ecclesiastical restrictions put
upon the limits within which the discussion needs to proceed. In particular,
consideration of womens ordination to the diaconate is not to be
entertained within the ambit of womens potential or aspirations for
ordination to the presbyterate.

An instance of these far-reaching restrictions made headlines in
Australia in 1996. On the agenda of the first gathering in Australia of the
World Union of Catholic Womens Organisations - said to be representing no
less than 30 million members - had been the proposal of the French-Canadian
delegation in Canberra calling for "ongoing dialogue ... within the church
concerning the access of women to ordained ministries". The proposal suggested,
according to the press report, that "vocation not gender should
determine who entered the priesthood." The proposal did not reach the
floor, however, because the Apostolic Pro-Nuncio, Archbishop Franco Brambilla,
"successfully demanded [its] withdrawal", informing the unions president,
Mrs Marie-Therese Van Heteren-Hogenhuis, that "the issue was a matter of
faith and therefore not to be debated." The president was reported as
having been "visibly shocked" at the Pro-Nuncios intervention.

Given the heightened tensions generated by such interventions, let us
try to simplify and at the same time clarify the question of women and
diaconate by looking back to the beginning of the modern diaconate early in the
course of the Second Vatican Council. Here, in October 1964, the council
determined that "it will be possible in the future to restore the diaconate as
a proper and permanent rank of the hierarchy". The future was not long coming,
for in an Apostolic Letter of June 18, 1967, Paul VI issued norms for restoring
the diaconate, which national conferences of bishops had the option of
implementing as they saw fit.

What had the modern church done here? Throughout its recorded history
the church had been ordaining "deacons", and even the earliest first and second
century Christian documents evidence men designated "deacons" holding an
official place in local churches alongside "bishops" and "presbyters".

Although the available evidence has made the deacons role
difficult to describe definitively, deacons survived - but not unscathed -
across both western and eastern churches until the time of the sixteenth
century Reformation. Within the Roman Catholic Church, where deacons as a
distinct level of clergy had by this era virtually disappeared, the memory of
them was kept alive by recurrent liturgical commemorations of deacons of yore,
including the supposed deacons Stephen and Philip of the so-called original
Seven, and others like the much honoured martyr Laurence of Rome of the third
century, the scholarly Ephraem of Syria of the fourth century, and the later
Francis of Assisi. But mainly the deacon was sustained in the collective memory
by making ordination to the diaconate a prerequisite for ordination to the
priesthood. Diaconate thus became merely a temporary status, and any theology
that may have attached to it was totally overwhelmed by the medieval theology
of a cultic priesthood. Deacons retained a form of their ancient ritual
vestment and performed certain liturgical functions, principally singing the
gospel at high mass and assisting at distribution of the eucharistic bread.

Not surprisingly the reformers, in their practicality and with their
strong pastoral orientation, considered the traditional diaconate a corrupt and
useless clerical appendage to the churchs ministerial body. They reacted
to it in different ways, usually abandoning ordination but tending to reform
this branch of the medieval order as an instrument for performing works of
charity and maintenance within the local congregation. This orientation was
mainly set on the assumption that in the first Christian communities such had
been the role of the "deacons". John Calvin was hugely influential here, and
Elsie Anne McKee has provided a definitive account of his creative influence.
For a broader view of the complexities of the diaconate at the time of the
Reformation Jeannine Olsons history is particularly informative.

Across the next centuries the reformed tradition too in turn lost much
of its direction until, within the German Lutheran churches, where the
diaconate had not ever effectively established itself, a renewed effort was
undertaken in the early and middle of the nineteenth century to create a
working diaconate of both women and men for the purposes of helping the sick
and the underprivileged. The initiators in this were mainly Lutheran pastors,
working independently of one another, and very largely with women, and never
succeeding in having their groups of deaconesses and deacons recognised in
their churches by any process of ordination. Their foundations were more in the
form of the Roman Catholic religious congregations dedicated to works of
charity and education, to whose style the founders were in fact indebted.
Progressively the new diaconate embraced a huge social undertaking throughout
the country which continues to this day. Again Jeannine Olson has told this
story in detail and has gone on to the story of the offshoots of the German
movement in Europe and especially in the 19th century British Empire
and North America.

Throughout these developments the medieval diaconate of the Roman
Catholic Church, which had not been directly affected by the reforming Council
of Trent in the late sixteenth century, continued to be the sacramental prelude
to priesthood. Indirectly it benefited from the tightening of admission to and
education for the priesthood. Thus the deacon remained a living museum of
ritual and vestment, his role in the liturgies being acted out mostly by
priests.

The story of the deacons transition from this fossilised state to
the stage where, thirty years after the reintroduction of the diaconate,
deacons number some twenty-two thousand easily gives an impression of success.
Most of these men are married, which is the first official instance of married
clergy in the Latin church for a thousand years, and most are active in
pastoral and liturgical roles. As is often remarked, however, the figures can
be deceptive. Both the spread of the diaconate across different countries and
the rates of its development there have always been very uneven: about 12,000
today in various dioceses of the United States but only 850 in Brazil, 2 in El
Salvador; over 2000 in Germany, 1600 in Italy, 1100 in France, but 1 in
Ireland, 3 in Poland; 198 in South Africa but 1 in Uganda, 7 in Zaire, 23 in
India, 6 in Japan; 46 in Australia, 36 in Micronesia, 3 in New Zealand, 3 in
Samoa, but 18 in Samoa (US). This all reflects uncertainties among bishops
arising from theological tensions we shall mention a little later.

In its origins, nonetheless, the story of the modern diaconate is truly
impressive in the vision, dedication and skills of a founding mover like Hannes
Kramer of Freiburg. What is useful for women to note who are contemplating a
campaign for the right to ordination as deacons is that the modern story of the
Catholic diaconate does not take us far from the Lutheran history just alluded
to. At the end of the Second World War Kramer and some associates, with the
prestigious assistance of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and others, saw a
need for a European church, then largely pastored by sacristy-bound priests, to
embody in society the kind of work which Jesus undertook on the margins of his
own society. This is now a familiar line - and indeed vast secular and
international organisations lay down their own philanthropic version of it.
Then, however, it was a striking call in a church whose energies were channeled
into dispensing and consuming sacraments and into devotional practices of a
private kind.

The call for a renewed diaconate was a call for the church to
institutionalise a commitment to the works of social justice by bringing those
working for social justice within the ambit of its hierarchical order. The
church would then perhaps be less inclined to continue its long drawn-out
competition in grandeur and power with the kingdoms of this world because in
its midst it would carry the sacramental sign of Jesus the servant of all.

This was how Kramer and his companions envisioned and lived a commitment
which they called a diaconate. Like their Lutheran compatriots, they took the
name "diaconate" from their understanding of what early Christians meant by
speaking in their ancient Greek of "deacons" and "deaconing". In these words,
which were variations of the Greek word diakonia (and often translated
by the other English words minister and serve),they heard the
summons of the one who "came not to be served but to serve (diakon-)"
(Mark 10.45), the same who made it plain that his followers were to welcome the
stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick... (Matthew 25.31-46).

At the sudden approach of the Second Vatican Council, Hannes Kramer was
instrumental in orchestrating the support of a specialist group of theologians
- in addition to Rahner, men as prominent as Congar, Häring, and Jedin -
as well as of fellow founding spirits of the movement like Hornef, Schamoni and
Winninger. These were among a list of 92 signatories to a letter to the
worlds bishops requesting that they support the cause of a permanent
diaconate at the Council. The letter (without the names, which one can see in a
1963 issue of the journal Worship) forms an appendix to McCaslin and
Lawlers Sacrament of Service. Many of these theologians also
contributed, under the direction of a Freiburg professor, Herbert Vorgrimler,
and with the cooperation and patronage again of Rahner, to the impressive 650
page volume of studies on the history, theology, and new pastoral possibilities
of the diaconate, Diaconia in Christo. Über die Erneuerung des
Diakonates [On the Renewal of the Diaconate], whose timely publication was
somehow managed for 1962. A copy both of this volume and of the petition was
presented to John XXIII in September 1962, just one month before the Council
opened in October.

In addition to such theological groundwork, the advocates of the
diaconate also cultivated the support of a broad range of sympathetic bishops
and other well placed clerics. Among the latter, significant was Jean Podhain,
executive officer of the official French Catholic agency of charity. In 1960 he
had circulated an impassioned plea for the re-establishment of a diaconate of
charitable works, and since he had also become a personal friend of John XXIII,
he was both well informed about the diaconal movement and well placed within
the Vatican to promote the interests of the diaconate during the council, which
he attended in an official capacity.

Such clerical support was important as bishops were by no means of one
mind on the idea that was gathering momentum. During the preparatory work on
the issue during 1962 strong divisions appeared, as Philippe Webers
succinct account records, and the opposition extended into the conciliar
debates themselves in 1963, as interventions by Cardinal Spellman of New York
illustrated. One gets the feel of the hostility in Ralph Wiltgens popular
account of the council, The Rhine flows into the Tiber.

In the end, however, the wide collaboration and the patronage of high
clerics brought Hannes Kramer and his colleagues the joy of the rapid
fulfilment of their dream. As we have seen, the Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church duly enshrined it in the document of November 21, 1964.

In all of these preparations Kramer and Rahner were careful not to
overlook aspects of diaconate beyond the works of charity which were their main
interest and the pursuit of whose recognition by way of sacramental ordination
to diaconate had given impetus to their undertaking. Hence the petition which
circulated among the bishops included among "essential features of the proposed
restoration of the diaconate" the listing of "the work of assisting in the
liturgy" and "the ministry of the word" in addition to "offices of charity".
These too were duly registered in the councils decree.

Foremost in the vision of these men, however, remained the "specific
function of the diaconate" named as "to serve", concerning which the petition
made the following fulsome commendation:

The specific function of the diaconate ... is "to serve," as the word
"deacon" itself implies.... Would it not further be a living testimony to the
Churchs concern for the temporal and supernatural welfare of men to have
deacons engaged in actual charitable work, bringing not only the Eucharistic
Bread but also the necessities of temporal life to the poor and suffering,
bringing Christ both sacramentally and in his burning care for the lowly and
oppressed into the places of neglect and destitution, of hunger and
sickness?

Over the following 35 years, for all the theological underpinning of the
diaconate by reflection on the deacons connection with liturgy and
ministry of the word, the "specific function" as conceived by "the Original
Deacon Circle" has undoubtedly remained the focus of the new diaconate in the
continent of Europe. The same is undoubtedly true of the diaconate in the
United States, where over half of the worlds deacons have been ordained
but where the deacons have a comparatively high liturgical profile. Their
personal testimonies in the journal Deacon Digest provide ample evidence
of their perceived highest commitment, just as their formation emphasises
it.

That such service constitutes the preeminent value is projected by
McCaslin and Lawler in Sacrament of Sevice, McCaslin having himself been
a diocesan director of a diaconate programme in the United States, and is
equally clearly reflected in the writings of similarly placed directors like
Timothy Shugrue ("Diakonia  Essential Element in the Life of the Church
") and Theodore Kraus, Projector Director for the revision of the National
Guidelines for the Formation of Deacons ("ordained into a special diakonia
understood essentially as service"), as well as in a more
popular presentation by a deacon, Lynn Sherman ("prime focus of
diakonia").

Why have I been emphasing this orientation of the modern Roman Catholic
diaconate to service of the needy and, earlier, the signs of the prior history
of this orientation in the initiatives of some German Lutheran pastors?
Principally because a simple but possibly quite acute problem arises in many
peoples minds about whether there is any need for an ordained minister of
this kind in the church. Indeed the problems surrounding the institution of
such a diaconate appeared so acute to a board of enquiry in the Anglican Church
in 1974 - if I may appear to diverge - that the boards first
recommendation, as stated in Deacons in the Church, was: "The diaconate
be discontinued in the Church of England", and this mainly on the following
ground:

the element of service to God and man, of devoted care particularly of
the poor and needy, is an element essential to the life of the Christian Church
... but the work need not necessarily be performed by officials called deacons
in an order of ministry.

The fact that some fifteen years later another Anglican working party
reversed this decision and in Deacons in the Ministry of the Church
recommended the institution of a permanent (in their terms "distinctive")
diaconate merely underlines the difficulty churches have been encountering in
their modern attempts to define and establish a credible diaconate. In the
latter case the about-turn was on the ground that the deacon should model to
the church "Christs diaconate" who came "not to be served, but to
serve... " (Mark 10.45).

These contrary problematical positions in regard to ordained diaconate
within the Church of England exemplify the one major difficulty experienced by
all churches. As stated in a study of the diaconate in the United Methodist
Church (USA) by Keller, Moede and Moore, "All of ministry is service because
ministry, or diakonia, means just that. What then is the unique role of
the diaconate?" In the United States, as early as 1975 Richard L. Rashke
revealed the range of tensions in Roman Catholic quarters in regard to
identifying the precise role of the deacon. Within the Roman Catholic Church
the difficulty is superficially blunted by the availability of an appeal in its
foundation document, the Constitution on the Church, to the threefold function
of deacons identified by the Second Vatican Council, namely, "the service of
the liturgy, of the Gospel and of works of charity", but, as I have tried to
illustrate, in practice the basic understanding of the permanent diaconate
remains one of a diaconate of service.

Accordingly, if diaconate rises or falls on the credibility of a
theology of service, a Roman Catholic woman weighing the advisability of
working for the admission of women to the diaconate has to decide whether
ordination to a role of service is really a gain for the church or for women,
especially in the light of the situation that the individual would be ordained
basically to perform service which every baptised Christian is called to. A
further consideration is whether it is advisable for women at this historic
stage of their empowerment to seek their first hierarchical endorsement in the
church in the form of service. While the feminist theologians reject such a
prospect out of hand  as Schüssler Fiorenza in "Feminist Ministry in
the Discipleship of Equals"  a consultation under the auspices of the
World Council of Churches in 1980 on Ordination of Women in Ecumenical
Perspective once recommended the idea.

Outside that aspect of the question, it seems for the moment at least
that the modern woman need not preoccupy herself with impediments she might
anticipate arising from the existing canon law because, perhaps surprisingly,
advice has been issued from the Canon Law Society of America that "ordination
of women to the permanent diaconate is possible."

In her other considerations the modern woman will no doubt wish to read
as widely as is realistic to expect from a busy woman among the current set of
books on deacons. Here I advise her, however, that she is likely to encounter a
range of views emanating from different denominational experiences and policies
which can confuse a Roman Catholic.

Thus the terminology, practice and understandings in the Baptist
tradition and in churches like Assemblies of God can be confusing for those
from churches with more traditional ministerial structures. Thus The Deacon
and His Ministry by Richard L. Dresselhaus would confuse a Roman Catholic
woman by identifying deacons with the official board of the local church
(Assembly). On the other hand, within the traditional but non-catholic churches
one will also come across a book like The Deaconess by Janet Grierson
which is not about ordained deaconesses at all but about the nineteenth century
Anglican institution for women parallel to the houses of German Lutheran
deaconesses mentioned above.

In much of the writing, nonetheless, the reader will recognise among the
many views and practices a general acceptance across the denominations of the
view of diaconate which led to last centurys Lutheran renewal. Basically
this view arises from an understanding that the original Greek word for deacon
meant a lowly servant. Moreover, this view presents the lowly servant of early
Christian parlance as acting out of a desire to meet the well-being of the
person being served. This benevolent self-giving is understood to embody the
pure ideal represented by Jesus when he spoke of himself as having come "to
serve, and to give his life... " (Mark 10.45), because here the Greek verb for
"serve" is related to the noun diakonos/deacon.

This linguistic view pervades virtually all modern writing about
diaconate. It originated in a popular nineteenth century understanding of the
diaconate as a ministry to the poor and needy, the high exemplars being
presented as the Seven men selected to "serve (diakon-) at tables" in
Acts 6.1-6 and also, two centuries later, as the deacon Laurence of Rome. In an
unfortunate but enduring development this popular understanding of diaconate
flowed over into theology, and I draw attention to only two books. One is the
second edition of James Monroe Barnetts widely read The Diaconate. A
Full and Equal Order and the other is Ormonde Platers Many
Servants. An Introduction to Deacons. Both write from within the tradition
of the North American Episcopal Church, which draws strongly on the Roman
Catholic tradition. In the one case Barnett makes the framework of all his
theology of church an understanding that diakonia, service, underlies
all forms of ordination and is a common calling of all the baptised; within
this framework, the essential role of the deacon is to symbolise this calling
to all, both ordained and non-ordained. In fact, in the pages of the newsletter
of the North American Association for the Diaconate, Barnett and I have debated
the appropriateness of his books emphasis on the kind of diakonia
underlying his conceptualisation of the church.

Views similar to Barnetts typify most writing on diaconate, as in
the popular book by the North American Epicopal writer John Booty, The
Servant Church, in the report to the United Methodist Church (USA) by
Keller, Moede and Moore, in the broader Protestant perspective of Alexander
Strauch, and in the Anglican vision of Robert Hannaford, in a contribution to
The Deacons Ministry. Such a list could extend indefinitely.

The weakness of this almost universally accepted position is its total
dependence on the linguistic understanding of diakonia as lowly or
loving service to others. This is exactly the position which my own published
linguistic research has demonstrated to be untenable. Being an academic study,
Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources is intimidating to some,
although the book was actually written in a way that aimed to make it
accessible to all who might want to pursue the questions arising from the
linguistic misconceptions addressed there; in fact, its Part I should hold no
terrors for the uninitiated as it sketches the mess that the theology of
ministry has been in through a wrong understanding of what early Christians
meant in their talk of ministry/diakonia. The second study, Are All
Christians Ministers? was written specifically for the kind of women and
men with such interests and includes a section on deacons.

The second writer mentioned above, Ormonde Plater, came quickly to
acknowledge the relevance of the book Diakonia at a very awkward stage
of the production of his own study. So convinced was he of the error of the
contemporary assumptions about diakonia as a loving Christian service,
assumptions on which he had operated in the writing of his book, that he held
up publication until he could use the newly published linguistic findings about
diakonia to modify his picture of the deacon.

These contrasting approaches to the very meaning of the deacons
office and title naturally produce different theologies of the office and call
for different job descriptions for the deacon. Precisely here commentators
either acknowledge the importance of the new linguistic evaluation of
diakonia in regard to diaconate or decry its nuisance value. Thus
Michael Putney, a consultant to the Australian Episcopal Conference on
diaconate (and himself now a member of the conference), extols the theology of
diaconate which can be constructed from the new understanding of
diakonia over the theologies depicted by Karl Rahner or the
Bishops Committee on the Permanent Diaconate (USA), asserting elsewhere
that "this whole area of theology can never be the same." The French-American
scholar of church and ecumenism, George H. Tavard, who had been a consultant
(peritus) at the Second Vatican Council, considers that had the book
Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources been published at the time of
the council, it "could have provided a basis for the needed theological
reflection."

The outcome of these few reflections on the state of research on the
origins and purpose of the diaconate would seem to be clear. Until there is a
measure of agreement on what the office means, what point is there for women to
seek entry into it? Career decisions can only be made on sound information. Why
should pastoral vocation be different? In my view conditions for womens
decisions in this matter are not yet right. What the Directory for
Deacons published in Italian by the Vaticans Congregation for the
Clergy in March 1998 might mean for women is yet to be seen, although one press
report had a curia cardinal saying the document implied the exclusion of women
from diaconal ordination. Such thinking may help women determine whether it
would be worth their while working for admission to the diaconate.

The clearest earlier indication of Vatican thinking on women and
diaconate is in the address by the secretary of the Congregation for the
Clergy, Archbishop Crescenzio Sepe, to the National Catholic diaconate
Conference (USA) in New Orleans on July 22, 1994. In his only reference to "the
so-called female daconate" Sepe threw cold water on any idea that
ancient deaconesses were sacramentally ordained, but this, as we saw from the
mention above of differences of opinion on this matter between Martimort and
Vagaggini, is to take sides in an academic debate.

On the other hand, on the view of diaconate which I have sketched in
some publications on the basis of the new linguistic description of
diakonia, I believe that possibilities exist within the diaconate for an
engagement by women and men in the real business of the ministry of the
churches. This real business is in the nurturing of our life of faith, a
question discussed in the final chapter of Are All Christians Ministers?
Essentially the diaconate would lie in the relationship with the pastoral
leaders, bishop in the first place and then the presbyters, but, as I have
already intimated in the second letter above, no relationship of real pastoral
relevance is likely to develop - hence no authentic diaconate - until the full
pastoral refurbishment of the office of bishop is taken up.

Should women ever get the opportunity to be officially engaged in this
process as deacons, what kind of enriched local churches might we have, and
what kind of further ministerial possibilities might these enlivened churches
encourage their women and men to explore?

Perhaps we can conclude with words of advice from the outstanding
Orthodox advocate of womens ministerial rights and capacities, Elisabeth
Behr-Sigel; words from her quarter may well be heard with sympathy by women
taking the trouble to read these pages.

The feminine deaconate should in no way be seen as a substitute for
their [womens] participation in the presbyteral ministry. Nor should it
serve as an alibi for avoiding a serious theological reflection about the
ordination of women to the priesthood.